In Memoriam_Edna O'Brien: Love, Loss and Literature

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In honor of Edna O'Brien, who died this week at 93, we invite you to listen to this re-broadcast of our episode. Edna O'Brien's first novel, "The Country Girls," was banned in Ireland, and burned in her own home parish. The year was 1960, and young Irish women of that era were NOT supposed to reflect on their lot in life, or harbor sexual desires. But Edna O'Brien had one goal as a young writer - to tell the truth. Decades later, her compatriots finally came to view her the way the rest of the world did: as a trailblazer, and as one of Ireland's greatest writers. Forty plus books and plays later, truth-telling was still Edna O'Brien's goal when we talked to her, at the age of 91, about her life and her love of words. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2024

Transcript

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0:00.0	Three years ago when we posted our episode about Edna O'Brien, it felt like she might just live forever.
0:10.0	The Irish novelist and short story writer was already 91 and she was still a force of nature, a rebel.
0:19.0	But even feisty Edna O'Brien who pushed a whole society to rethink its views on women, could not fight
0:26.6	the forces of mortality.
0:28.8	And sadly, on Tuesday, July 27th, she passed away in London. To honor Miss O'Brien, we invite you to take
0:37.1	another lesson to our episode. Hi, this is Alice.
0:45.0	These days Edna O'Brien is often referred to as Ireland's greatest living writer.
0:55.0	But that's not what she used to be called.
0:58.0	Far from it.
0:59.0	Her first novel, The Country Girls, was banned when it came out in 1960, banned and burned, as were the next six novels she wrote.
1:10.0	Irish women of that era were expected to stay tethered to their stoves and their needlepoint
1:16.6	and raise their children in the Catholic Church.
1:19.8	But Edna O'Brien's writing led on that they had dreams and interior lives and sexual desires.
1:29.0	Once during a kiss, I opened my eyes to steal a glance at his face.
1:35.9	The streetlight was shining directly onto the car. His eyes were closed tight,
1:41.8	his lashes trembling on his cheeks, and his carved pale face was the face of an old, old man.
1:52.0	I closed my eyes then and thought only of his lips and his hands and the
1:59.4	warm heart that was beating wildly beneath his waistcoat, beneath his starched white shirt.
2:07.4	How scandalous!
2:09.8	But Edna O'Brien was not then and is not now in it to shock. She's in it to speak the truth, with
2:17.7	sentences that are crafted with excruciating care. Philip Roth once described her as, quote, among the most accomplished living writers in the English language.
2:29.0	And although she has lived in England, her entire life her use of language like her heart is all Irish.
	...

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